1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to internet access terminals. More particularly, the present invention is related to public-access internet terminals.
2. Discussion of Related Art
It is estimated that, in the United States alone, e-commerce in 1999 had gross revenues of $500 billion. Everything from shoes to cars and stock quotes, from recorded music to legal advice is now available on-line. Most of those purchases made over the internet were probably made using a personal credit card account and a personal computer at the buyer's home. In developing countries, however, less than 5% of the general population has a computer at home. Many of the rest do not have telephones at home, much less computers or internet access. Therefore it is scarcely surprising that, on average, only 2% of the population in these developing countries uses internet service. Moreover, since e-commerce is carried on mostly by reading and writing one of the major commercial languages, in geographically isolated areas local inhabitants' resulting educational and linguistic isolation can often make the “digital divide” even harder to bridge. For example, rural people in some areas of Latin American are fluent in neither Spanish nor Portuguese, speaking local non-European dialects instead.
Unfortunately, up to now, the cost of buying a computer equipment and maintaining an internet link has left many, in the United States as well as elsewhere, demographically on the wrong side of the so-called “digital divide” and, although computers are becoming omnipresent in the workplace, even people who use computers at work are not authorized to use those computers for making personal purchases. In industrialized countries, many of the people who cannot use the computer at work for personal purposes are also often commuters who average less than 12 to 14 hours at home each day, even if they do have a computer at home. In developing countries families are often pulled apart by their members moving to large urban centers or foreign countries in search of work, not returning home for months or years at a time.
Entertainment and communications services are what attract first-time users to e-commerce on the internet most often, in part because purchasing entertainment and communications services involves little or no financial risk to the use. What you see is what you get in purchasing such services, unlike mail-order purchases. Also, because anxiousness is produced by “unfamiliarity” but “novelty” is entertaining, people of all ages find changes in technology easier to accept when they are first encountered in the context of entertainment rather than in a business context. Videoconferencing is a form of communications particularly valuable to separated families, and long distance and international internet conference calls need cost no more than local video conferencing. That is certainly less expensive than travel costs involved in achieving such face-to-face contact by any other means.
If entertainment and communications services can attract the mass base needed for implementing e-commerce services in underserved areas in the United States and abroad, the high cost and rapid obsolescence of the multimedia computer equipment required by entertainment and communications services has also contributed to the persistence of that “digital divide”. Incompatibly among multimedia formats and local scarcity of broadband communication service impairs the usefulness of multimedia equipment and the broadband access required by streaming multimedia data is an expensive luxury in most places. Thus at present, access to multimedia services at home, even in affluent areas, is limited to whatever equipment each person can afford to buy and is willing to update in this rapidly evolving technology.
The high cost and rapid obsolescence of multimedia equipment and infrastructures particularly unfortunate for those most in need of such facilities, those people put at a disadvantage by their present economic or geographic or linguistic isolation. Internet access could provide a bridge between them and the larger national and international marketplace to bring them out of that isolation. In particular, e-commerce is a potentially potent catalyst for further economic development in such areas, but the infrastructure and services that support e-commerce require a mass base in order to provide such benefits.
Kiosks and booths of various types that provide paid communications services to business travelers are well known, but do not address this problem. Apart from telephone service carrels an booths, U.S. Pat. No. 5,812,765 discloses an example of a public-access carrel similar to others provided in airports and other transportation hubs by subscription-based Internet service providers (ISPs) such as AT&T, for promotional purposes. The booths are designed to promote the distinctive features of their ISP service to travelers who already use the Internet, business people with a credit card in their pocket and time on their hands. This attempt to attract people away from competing ISPs may increase their market share, but does nothing to build a local mass base for e-commerce and distance learning.
The public terminals shown in FIG. 1 and disclosed in the '765 patent are notable in that they also provide employer-subsidized services used free of charge by the employer's traveling executives, who are identified by the credit cards, PIN numbers, etc. input to the terminal by the user: corporate voice mail, corporate e-mail, corporate shipping and receiving records, and a meeting schedule utility. The services available to the public from these booths are provided for use by affluent business travelers are designed for use by the employees as an extension of the computer network they use in their home office. As special purpose equipment, it is too expensive for use by novices and too intimidating to help build a mass base for e-commerce and distance learning. The requirement that the user have a credit card account in order to use such booths further reduces their usefulness in developing countries, as is discussed below.
Another paid multimedia communication service targeted at another affluent market is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,845,636. This is a private booth that has either a slow-scan video camera and dedicated PSTN telephone links, or a fast-scan video camera where broadband dedicated cable or microwave links are available, for use in upscale business transactions where face-to-face contact is desirable, such as car rentals. The great majority of those who do not have computers at home are also much more comfortable doing business with suppliers face-to-face They do not rent cars a such a service is too costly for casual use.
On the other hand, at the opposite end of the economic scale from traveling executives and their rental cars, U.S. Pat. No. 5,949,411 discloses a network of free kiosks that display promotional idle-time audio-visual clips taken from mass-market entertainment products, such as movies to the general public in public places. Each viewer is required to respond to market research questions that provide data for use in marketing such materials, using a touch-screen graphical user interface (GUI) on the display screen in order to view longer segments of that audio-visual material. In this way, the kiosk network is able to collect information about the demographics of its mass market, in addition to data on the selections viewed and responses to subsequent questions. The kiosk's idle-time displays of short clips, like the attract-mode displays provided by coin-operated video games in an arcade, are designed to encourage all people to interact with the computers to see a continuation of the clip being displayed. As with video games, the general public tends to find such an invitation irresistible, even if they've had no previous contact with computers. However, the operation of this kiosk network provides nothing to the viewer but amusement and nothing to the sponsor but market research. It does nothing to bridge the “digital divide” that hampers e-commerce.
E-commerce has become a very cost-effective means for achieving worldwide mass distribution of goods and services to customers in most developed countries, in part because the goods can be delivered directly from warehouses to the individual customer, which greatly reduces the seller's “bricks and mortar” capital investment and overhead expense. Unfortunately, the absence of a “bricks and mortar” base, reduces the usefulness of e-commerce itself in developing countries. Although e-commerce and internet communications are potentially important as economic development tools a very tangible presence and practical support services are needed. To date, cost-effective mass-based e-commerce has developed only where a mass of consumers are affluent enough to have the opportunity to become confident users of the world-wide web (www), what is commonly referred to as “The Internet”. This additional investment in building and staffing local places of business is a commitment that conventional e-commerce sites, with their narrow or non-existent profit margins, are not likely to undertake even in the United States much less the developing countries.
How can e-commerce be extended to the disenfranchised population on the dark side of the “digital divide” so that these families can take full advantage of the potentially global and universally advantageous characteristics of the e-commerce market place in areas where purchasers are not accustomed to mail-order, much less e-commerce? First the hardware and software costs of reaching and educating new users must somehow be reduced or offset, before the savings available through mass distribution can be realized and the remote regions that have been left out of the country's economic development re-integrated into it.
Second, where mature mass-market infrastructure is absent, some form of personal and continuing, face-to-face and day-to-day contact to assure purchasers of the quality and reliability of e-commerce transactions is a practical necessity, not a luxury. Peculiarities of the economic infrastructure of developing countries frequently contribute to their relative economic isolation. In particular, securing payment for e-commerce purchases in developing countries is often problematic. In the United States, the security of conventional remote commercial transactions with consumers by telephone, mail, or the Internet, relies in part on the identification of the buyer's name with the telephone number or the internet service account that the buyer uses to make a purchase. Alternatively, the ship-to address given for the goods is correlated with the billing address of that telephone or Internet account and/or the billing address for the credit card used to make the purchase. However, as with gift orders, this is often not possible outside the industrialized countries of the world because many people do not use credit cards and the only billing address may be a Post Office box, not a street addresses.
Furthermore, in any international purchase, a buyer may prefer not to provide credit information to a foreign jurisdiction having commercial laws and customs that are unfamiliar to the buyer. Therefore, for many reasons, account verification for purchases sent to developing countries may not be available to the seller, or may not provide adequate assurance of payment for these purchases.
Securing the value received in such transactions is a matter of concern for both parties. From the merchant's point of view, in order for international mass-market e-commerce to be efficient enough to make its potential benefits a practical reality, rather than merely a theoretical possibility, it is necessary to provide assured payment for the goods and services delivered. This reduces its cost to the merchant by reducing the merchant's financial risk. From the buyer's point of view, suppliers who are located in any foreign country, including the United States, and who do not themselves have a local affiliate or other trusted local intermediary in the buyer's area, also need some way of assuring the buyer that the goods they are being asked to pay for will be received in good order and all warranties will be honored.
Mass-based exchange and customs brokerage services must also be implemented, services have customarily been provided only at the wholesale level for high volume transactions or high-priced goods. Again, implementation of such import/export services is likely to be most critically important for purchasers in the isolated local communities that have been the least likely to have had access to such services. These are also often people who lack the business connections and experience necessary to obtain such services at affordable rates, which further contributes to making e-commerce transactions unavailable to many people, worldwide.